Privacy reef

Right to be forgotten

Smile: Your Selfie Is A Mugshot For The NSA. The selfie phenomenon is undoubtedly making the NSA’s job easier by producing a mountain of tagged online data to feed its facial recognition algorithms.

A report in The New York Times, based on documents from 2011 obtained by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveals that the US security agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly under the Obama administration – coinciding with a rise in popularity of taking and tagging self portraits on online social networks. The newspaper reports that the agency has turned to new software to process the flood of images being included in digital communication including social media, email, messaging, videoconferencing and other types of online comms. The 2011 documents show that agency officials believe technological advances in facial recognition software could revolutionize the way the NSA finds intelligence targets around the world.
Facebook: Do not to release your new app feature that listens to users’ conversations.

Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google And Yahoo Join Apple In Revealing More On NSA Requests. All the big tech companies are opening up a bit more about requests made by the U.S.

Facebook sent some partners a playfully illustrated eMagazine called The Annual, but I’ve acquired a copy from a source and the stats inside are serious business. The report divulges user counts for some key international markets like Germany, which now has 25 million users, and 18 million mobile users. Previously, Facebook had only shared combined web and mobile user counts by multi-country region, and its mobile user counts as global totals. The problem is that hides what parts of the world are driving its mobile growth, which has brought it to a total of 874 million monthly mobile users and 507 million daily mobile users as of September 2013, out of a total 1.19 billion month user across all devices. So for several quarters I called for Facebook to release more detailed international mobile stats.
Las fotos de perfil de las redes dicen mucho de uno mismo. Las redes sociales cada vez son más importantes a la hora de construirse una identidad en internet.

But along with these technologies came an extension in the NSA’s reach few in the early 1990s could have imagined. Details that in the past might have remained private were suddenly there for the taking.
ProPublica's Jeff Larson on the NSA Crypto Story. Yesterday, ProPublica, the New York Times, and the Guardian collaboratively broke the story of the NSA’s Bullrun program and its encryption-cracking capabilities.

This afternoon, Erin Kissane sat down with ProPublica’s Jeff Larson—with an assist from news apps editor Scott Klein—to talk about the tech involved and why the story needed someone from the team affectionately called the news nerds. Larson and Klein Explain it All So how long have you been working on this project?

This, it seems, is the prospect we face in the latest phase in the battle of the internet giants to grab and exploit all the information they can on our private lives.
The Erosion of Privacy and the Rise of Publicness…and why it’s a good thing. Microsoft anima a abandonar el Gmail. Cam Over, el 'concurs' per a neutralitzar càmeres de videovigilància.